Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Hurricane Sandy's impact on the Atlantic Coast of the United States intensified, as it combined with the full moon at high tide. The Hunter’s Moon, which is also known as blood moon or sanguine moon, is the name given to October’s full moon. It follows the Harvest Moon, which is September’s moon. Historically, the brightness of the moon made it ideal for hunters at night in Northern Europe. Native Americans adopted the name, as they hunted game for the winter by its light. (Folks sometimes confuse the Harvest Moon with the Hunter's Moon, because once every 4 years or so the Harvest Moon appears in October instead of September. When that happens, the Hunter’s Moon is in November.) Full moons have higher than normal tides which exacerbated the hurricane's destructive force and surging seas.

Well, I am not sure that these women are at all happy, but they do seem rather independent and several appear fiercely self-assured. It was surely an unsettled time in Germany. Weimar Germany (1919–33) was creating an extreme nationalism among may citizens who were humiliated by the military defeat in the WWI(1914–18); the terms of the Treaty of Versailles; economic depression; and the swirling confusion in society. In exploiting and excusing the German military defeat, emerging Nazism created Dolchstosslegende claiming that the German war effort was internally sabotaged, by Jews, socialists, Bolshevik, the Social Democrats, and the Ebert Government. There was enough distrust, hate, decadence, and general unrest to upset anyone, even women.

.Reginald Mitchell is a 52 year old native of New Orleans, Louisiana, known for his slightly distorted vision of the world around him.Physically slight & frail with a speech impediment, Reginald grew up in the harshness of public housing projects in the city.Subject to regular teasing, taunting, & frequent run-ins with the local thugs, Reggie says, "I'm glad I'm out of there."In the early 1990's, he began to paint scenes of New Orleans, grand southern mansions, & exotic locations.After several years spent living in Houston, Mitchell is back living in southern Louisiana.Usually he paints from photographs he finds in library books, magazines, and postcards.He also paints from his immediate surroundings: food boxes, snapshots, houses in his neighborhood.He always makes his name an integral part of his work, ritualistically painting it with the brush in one hand then going over it with the brush in the other hand.Reginald Mitchell's expressionist paintings of architectural landmarks are explosions of color & energy.He intuitively captures the atmosphere & energy that resonates throughout the world around him.

As proudly inscribed on most of his paintings, William Hawkins was born in Kentucky on July 27, 1895, though he spent much of his adult life in & around Columbus, Ohio, where he first moved in 1916 to avoid a shotgun wedding. One of the most highly regarded African-American self-taught artists of the 20th-century, Hawkins worked tirelessly at numerous jobs—often simultaneously—ranging from breaking horses & running numbers to industrial steel casting & truck driving.

William Hawkins (Self-Taught American artist, 1895-1990) Horse with Yellow Tail Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York

He served in the Army in World WW I, working burial details in France. Hawkins began painting in the 1930s, though he only dedicated himself exclusively to art around 1979, when he was discovered by neighboring artist Lee Garrett, leading to national attention & what collectors generally describe as his mature period.

William Hawkins (Self-Taught American artist, 1895-1990) Elk with Human Eyes Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York

Tending to paint with a single brush & semigloss enamels on large plywood & Masonite surfaces, he often worked from his own black-&-white photographs of buildings & animals, boldly articulating his unique, expressionistic interpretations of architectural form, religious subjects, & nature studies in bright color & broad, patterned brushstrokes. By the time of his death in 1990, Hawkins had amassed a body of work comprising approximately 500 paintings & pencil drawings (not counting his lost early pieces), gradually turning toward human figuration in his final years. His highly personal visions of architecture & pop cultural themes are generally rendered in a restrained palette, sometimes including collaged found objects or images to designate depth & dimension in lieu of conventional perspective or detail. William Hawkins is one of America’s most widely exhibited & collectable self-taught painters, and his work can be found at the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; & in Ohio at the Columbus Museum of Art & the Akron Art Museum.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Born in Sacramento, California, Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) was the 3rd child of the master grainer (coach painter) for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Oldfield left school in 1906, to apprentice at a local print shop. Restless, he boarded a train & job-hopped from California to Nevada & Montana & Idaho. He then enrolled in Best's Art School, San Francisco in 1909, working nights as a bellhop to support himself. He left for Paris in 1910, where he studied in for 15 years, attending the Julian Academy, Rue Fromentin.Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) The Artist and His WifeOf his arrival in Paris, he said, “Well, I noticed on the sign there, it had been Bouguereau’s Academy at one time. But at the time I was there, Tony Robert-Fleury was the master there. He’d come in once a week. And it was very funny, when the master came in the word with him was “silence” and we had to be very quiet. He would never go to anyone except those who had worked with him for a while and then we would group around him and listen…” Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) White Dress 1936Early on, Fleury reviewed Oldfield’s work, “At that time I was new there and I had to have an interpreter. The master just looked me over, and then he looked at the painting and he said, “All right, you’re an artist.” I felt it was very nice afterward when I thought about it…”Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) Telegraph Hill“Tony Robert-Fleury, was , he had gone into Impressionism, and we were taught in that manner. You see, you get taught in a certain manner and I think that stays with you. You can try to get in or out of it, but what you have is kind of stamped there. ..”Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) The Yellow Dress 1929“We didn’t pay the master, we paid the fee, and I think it was, you give it by six months or you give it by the year. As I remember it now, the first six months they advised me to take it that way, I paid twenty-eight dollars.”Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969)“We went to work at eight o’clock in the morning and we worked all through the week until five, Saturday included. Then in the evening we’d go from five to seven, quick sketching, we’d pay for that, it cost a franc – twenty cents. Then after that we’d meet at somebody’s studio and talk a little bit, and then we’d go out and find a cheap restaurant and eat there…And then free night school, we went three times a week with only a male model, and during that time we would go to night school until eleven o’clock…And Sunday we’d take a streetcar ride with our paint boxes and go out to Meudon, or some place at the end of the line, you know, and sit down and paint – the group of us – you know. And we’d take a little lunch or we’d stop at one of those bistros and have something…” Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) Purple Sweater 1933

“…at first I was with four boys. We rented a studio, and then that got too expensive so we took a little flat next door that had two rooms. And so we divided up that way, and we would cook our meals sometimes….that’s where we slept and where we worked and where we were at home. But as I say, if the weather was good, we took the streetcar for a ride. You could ride pretty far and pretty long for the fee that they took. Of course we visited all the places around there, like Rodin’s [Auguste Rodin] place [Villa des Brillants, Meudon, France] and whatnot, I mean we were interested in their work.”Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) Little Four-Year-Old Girl“… the Louvre on our Sundays, that was sort of a ritual, see, if it was bad weather we went to museums and we’d just stay pretty near the whole day there…And then we would go to the Luxembourg and see what was there, because in there it’s the living artists, you see. When they’re dead they go into the Louvre. And then of course there were the trips across the water. We were from Montmartre, you see we were Montmartrois, and we’d go and see the boys over in the Latin Quarter side…Although none of us had much money, we were young, we could do a lot of things that you can’t do otherwise, unless you’re young and can do it that way.”Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) the-The Bluff of Telegraph HillUpon returning to the U.S., Oldfield settled briefly Sacramento before returning to San Francisco to accept a post as a teacher at the California School of Fine Art. Oldfield developed a bold modernist style. He married artist Helen Clark who often modeled for him. In 1936, Oldfield was one of a group of San Francisco artists chosen for a WPA project to paint murals in San Francisco’s Coit Tower. Following WW II, Oldfield taught at the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland. He died in San Francisco in 1969.Otis William Oldfield (1890–1969) The Pink Dress 1935

Otto Scholderer's portraits are somehow calming. Although he painted landscapes & still lifes of flowers, these are a few of his portraits of women. These are women simply doing what they have to do with no melodrama, but they are thinking about it.

Otto Franz Scholderer (1834-1902) was born in Frankfurt am Main. He was the son of Johann Christoph Scholderer and Emilie Kiefhaber. He studied at the Städel academy of arts 1849-51. Among his teachers was painter Jakob Becker. Scholderer established himself in Städel as a freelance painter. During this period, his friendship with Victor Müller began. Scholderer became his brother-in-law in 1868.

Otto Franz Scholderer (German painter, 1834-1902) The Letter

Müller acquainted Scholderer with the works of Gustave Courbet. Scholderer made several short study trips to Paris between 1857-58, where he became friends with Henri Fantin-Latour & Édouard Manet, who influenced work. Fantin-Latour depicted Scholderer in his picture Studio aux Batignolles.

In 1866, Scholderer established himself in Düsseldorf & made friends with Hans Thoma. With Thoma, Scholderer went in 1868 to Paris & returned to Germany only shortly before the outbreak of the French-German War.

At the beginning of 1871 he went to London. Otto Franz Scholderer married, at age 38, Luise Philippine Conradine Steuerwaldt, age 34, in 1872 at Roehampton, Wandsworth District, County of Surrey, England. Two years later, they had a son Victor. The artist worked there till the autumn of 1899, when Scholderer returned to his hometown of Frankfurt, where he died at the age of 68 early in 1902.

Lonnie Bradley Holley, sometimes known as The Sand Man, is an African American artist & art educator.

Holley began his artistic life in 1979, by carving tombstones for his sister's two children who died in a house fire. He used blocks of a soft sandstone-like by-product of metal casting which was discarded in piles by a foundry near his sister's house. He believes that divine intervention led him to the material & inspired his artwork.

Inspired to create, Holley made other carvings & assembled them in his yard along with various found objects. In 1981, he brought a few examples of his sandstone carvings to Birmingham Museum of Art director Richard Murray.

Murray introduced him to the organizers of the 1981 exhibition "More Than Land & Sky: Art from Appalachia" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Soon his work was being acquired by other institutions, such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York & the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. His work has also been displayed at the White House and in Birmingham, England.

By the mid-1980s, his work had diversified to include paintings & recycled found-object sculptures. His yard & adjacent abandoned lots near his home became an immersive art environment that was celebrated by visitors from the art world, but plundered by scrap-metal scavengers & eventually threatened by the expansion of the Birmingham International Airport.

In late 1996, Holley was notified that his hilltop property near the airport would be condemned. He rejected the airport authority's offer to buy the property at the market rate of $14,000, knowing that his site-specific installation had personal & artistic value, he demanded $250,000. The dispute went to probate court; & in 1997, a settlement was reached & the airport authority paid $165,700 to move Holley's family & work to a larger property in Harpersville, Alabama.

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On March 4, 2011, Emile de Bruijn of the National Trust in the UK, wrote on his blog "Treasure Hunt" of making history & art available to all: "Traditionally art history has been inherently elitist & exclusive, both socially & intellectually. Art tended to be commissioned by the upper classes. Connoisseurship was seen as a superior, refined skill & the products of art-historical scholarship were guarded almost as fiercely as the art itself."

On May 29, 1012, William Noel, now Director of Special Collections Center & Director of Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. University of Pennsylvania, told The TED Blog, "...digital data is not a threat to real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data. There is the further fact that the data is funded by taxpayers’ money. So it didn’t seem fair to limit what taxpayers could do with the data that they paid for."

On February 7, 2017, Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced a new policy: all images of public-domain artworks in the Museum's collection are now available for free & unrestricted use. "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our images with the public for a number of years. Our comprehensive & diverse museum collection spans 5,000 years of world culture & our core mission is to be open & accessible for all who wish to study & enjoy the works of art in our care. Increasing access to the Museum’s collection & scholarship serves the interests & needs of our 21C audiences by offering new resources for creativity, knowledge, & ideas."